


Once and Future

by oliviacirce



Category: Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms, Winter Solstice Camelot Station - John M. Ford
Genre: Arthurian, Christmas, Magic, Multi, Mythology - Freeform, Roman Britain, Time - Freeform, Trains, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 15:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17025657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oliviacirce/pseuds/oliviacirce
Summary: Rex Invictus.





	Once and Future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phoebe_Zeitgeist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoebe_Zeitgeist/gifts).



> Thanks to Ari, Molly, Lucy, Hannah, and Cat, to my awesome recipient, and to whoever nominated this fandom, because I love you. If you somehow ended up here and haven't read the poem, you can read it [here](http://thegreenbelt.blogspot.com/2006/12/winter-solstice-camelot-station.html).

On the shortest day of the year, the station master rises before dawn. His house is cold, frost filigree on the window panes, but the fire burns steadily in the farmhouse kitchen, the massive iron range as reliable as its cousins on the tracks. He warms his hands around a pot of tea—Wedgwood bone china with green Chinese tigers, a gift from Vivian up at the castle—before straightening his uniform cap and pulling on the heavy wool coat with the gold buttons. 

It's a short walk from the station master's house to the station, but the snow has been falling all night, carpeting the walk and the service road, the carpark and the shops, the clean straight lines of the tracks. It's clear now, except for a few tumbling flakes; the snow arrives and departs on time for Christmas Court, the machinery of Camelot at work. In the faintly shimmering space that precedes the sunrise, the great Gothic arches of the station are frosted in glistening white, and the station master's boots leave the first crisp tracks in the untouched snow. 

He unlocks the service door with a key from his iron ring and goes up the back stairs to his office. He could find his way in the dark, but he lights the lamps on the stairs as he goes, slowly rousing the slumbering dragon of the station. From his office he flips the exchange and watches the rest of the lights come on, blinding for an instant against the barrel-vaulted glass of the rotunda, above the ticket counters and the gates and the bar, around the bright crown of stained-glass windows. For a moment, the knights in the windows seem to move: Galahad's golden head bowing as he drinks from the crystal cup; Gawain drawing his sword against an unknown knight in green. 

Then the light settles, and the only things that move are the ticking arms of the station's great Thwaites & Reed clock. It's a quarter past six, and there's work to be done. The first train of the day is the 7:02 Din Eidyn Overnight Mail. 

Just as the station master notes the time, there are voices on the stairs—three voices raised in a remarkably harmonious "Greensleeves" that grows louder as the rest of the station's senior staff come into the office. There's Geoffrey, the assistant station master, anxiously competent and armed with the day's schedules and deviations; there's John, still young to be head porter and cheerfully disheveled, smoothing down his uniform jacket with a grin; there's white-haired Gwion, chief of the ticket-office.

The last notes of the song ring out as the station master turns away from his office windows, and it's the music as much as the lights that make the station feel awake, alive. 

"Good morning, sir," John says with a quick half-bow, suddenly solemn. It's the most important day of their year, when the knights come home. 

"Good morning, gentlemen," says the station master, and nods to Geoffrey, who clears his throat and opens his book. As Geoffrey briefs them on the arrivals and departures, the alerts that have come in from Portsmouth and Gare d'Avalon—a track out on the Calais line, a stopped train on the Cumbrian Coast—the station master rounds up his troops and leads them back down the stairs and out into the station proper. 

Despite the weather, the mosaic floor is flawlessly clean, and the murals and tapestries are all lit to their best advantage, which should be impossible in winter, at dawn, in a rotunda with a glass-and-iron roof. Merlin explained the magic to him once, but they'd been deep into a bottle of port from the castle's special reserve, and the station master has never been able to remember the details. 

Their first stop is the station bar, where the barman slides him a pint. The bar itself—which predates the mosaic and the original tapestries and most of the murals—is made of oak and apple and ash, and the barman is a short, grizzled man with brown skin and a Roman nose. 

"Io Saturnalia," says the station master. 

The barman grins. "Near enough." Caius Horatius Tunetanus, the barman of Camelot Station, still looks like the soldier he once was, though he's long since exchanged his leather armor for a leather apron, worn today over a crisp white linen shirt with the cuffs folded back to reveal sinewy forearms. His gold tie pin is in the shape of an eagle, holding the number IX in its curved talons. But Albion has been Horatius's home for as long as there has been an Albion, and when the station master turns to make his toast, Horatius joins him. 

"Long live the King," they say together, with Geoffrey and John and Gwion, and lift their glasses to the mural of the King, high above the ranks of doors that lead onto the platforms. In paint, the King is bearded and serious, with watchful blue eyes below the encircling gold of his painted crown. He looks the way a king ought to look: noble and brave and kind, golden and untouchable; in truth, it's not a very good likeness. 

"Rex Invictus," Horatius murmurs, knocking back a measure of his pint. 

The beer is very good, but the station master limits himself to the one ceremonial pint. There will be time enough later, when the men and women of Camelot Station gather for their own celebrations. He finishes his beer and slides the glass back across the bar. "Salve, Horatius," he says, and they exchange salutes before the barman turns back to his work. 

Their next stop is the ticket booths, where they leave Gwion to supervise his clerks, and then on into the cloakroom, where the ranks of uniformed porters await John's instructions. Out under the rotunda again, Geoffrey surveys the boards with their lines of arrivals and departures. "Does it ever get old, sir?" he asks, quiet in the calm before the storm. 

"Never," says the station master. 

It never does, for all that he's older than he can quite remember, memories hazy between departures and arrivals. He remembers—or he thinks that he remembers—when the station was a camp on the shore of a lake, a garrison at a crossroads; when it was a posting inn with a carriage house; when the tracks were straight Roman roads, and when the knights came on foot, and then on horseback, and then in high-perch phaetons and coaches and curricles, before the train tracks unfurled like ribbons across the country and the air was filled with steam. He thinks, when he thinks about it at all, that he and the station have changed as the world has changed, with the passage of time and empires. 

At other times, though—when the Broceliande Local runs late, and the track engineers argue over divine right of kings, and he has to get on the wire to translate the old Druid tower codes for the lads up at the interchange—he thinks that the trains are all he's ever known. 

The hands of the great clock tick towards the hour, and in the distance he can hear the faint whistle of a steam engine, a call to arms. 

"Ready?" the station master asks. 

"Ready," says Geoffrey, and they go to work. 

*

When Sir Kay and his company arrive, the station master is out on track six, consulting with the conductor of a Stourbridge Lion due to depart for Caernarfon. The porter who comes to find him is a stout ginger-haired man called Llewelyn, and once the station master has dispatched the conductor with a minimum of grumbling, he follows Llewelyn back into the station. 

"The seneschal's an X-class locomotive all by himself," Llewelyn says, "steam coming out his ears and all." He adds, a touch belatedly, "Sir." 

"I doubt that," the station master says dryly. In all the years he's known Sir Kay, he's rarely seen him steaming. Sir Kay is a practical man, sanguine and imperturbable, and the station master is not surprised to find him calmly marshaling his troops under the rotunda, stolidly ignoring the eager eyes of the press—corralled by Geoffrey to their appointed region, behind a velvet rope line they'll willfully ignore when the heavy-hitters begin to arrive. 

There's no steam coming out of the seneschal's ears, but the station master takes Llewelyn's point: Sir Kay runs on tracks as constant as the Trans-Siberian Railway, sturdy rolling stock and a crisp timetable. His eyes are sharp as a hawk's, and he sees the station-master coming from across the rotunda and turns to greet him. 

They shake hands heartily. "All's well, station master?" Sir Kay asks. 

"All's well, Sir Kay," the station master replies. "Happy Christmas." 

Beside Sir Kay, Lady Elayne, in a camel-colored Burberry coat, flashes a smile. "Happy Christmas," she says, and comes forward to bestow a feathery kiss on the station master's cheek and press a heavy silk bag—gold, if the station master is any judge—into his hand. "From the castle," Elayne says, "with our thanks." 

There's the shrill cry of a train whistle, loud as a hunting horn, and they all turn. The knights are coming. The station master bows quickly and leaves Kay's party to collect their arrivals, moving back out to the platforms, past the press. It's controlled chaos, from that point on: trains roaring in and out of the station; porters running past with steamer trunks and band boxes; flashbulbs and shouted names and calls of greeting; the whistles of the conductors and the rush of steam. To the station master, Camelot Station at peak season is a symphony. He follows the lines as they weave together into music, movements he knows by heart. 

The Northern Line; the Orient Express; the Logres Limited—and Sir Galahad, pursued as always by some over-eager member of the press, slips out the left-hand departure gates and lets the station master usher him out the service door and into the snow-dusted carpark, where Dindrane is waiting at the wheel of a Bentley Continental with the motor running. 

“Happy Christmas,” Galahad says with a blinding smile, and flips the station master a coin before sliding into the back of the car. 

The station master looks down at the coin in his hand as the car drives away. It's as golden as Galahad's hair, heavy and gleaming in the low light of the winter sun, and embossed on both sides with a stylized (but utterly recognizable) grail. Impossible to spend or exchange, but equally impossible to refuse. He goes back into the station and climbs the stairs to his office, where he unlocks the heavy wooden chest under the windows with the smallest key on his iron ring. Inside, countless identical golden coins wink up at him, grails upon grails. He drops the newest coin inside and locks the chest again. 

Out his office windows, he can see the beating heart of his station: Geoffrey and the press; John and his legion of porters; Kay and Elayne, gathering the knights in the center of the rotunda, with the mosaic of the Round Table beneath their feet. Alive with light and life and laughter, the station glows, and down in the bar, Horatius is laying aside casks for the station's celebration and hanging mistletoe to ward against the dark. One more year they've made it through; one more year worth celebrating before their cycle starts again. 

He knocks a fist gently against the lid of the chest, and goes back downstairs to keep the symphony moving. 

*

On St Stephen’s Day, the station master is awake and waiting for the knock on his door when it comes, in the crystal-cold early hours of the morning. When he opens the door, there are three people waiting for him in the dark: two great ugly men, and a woman dressed for riding. The woman and one of the men are tying up the horses next to the house, alongside the water trough he laid out for them. Both men wear workman's clothes, clean but patched and plain, though the pommel of a sword pokes out somewhat incongruously from the pack on the first man's back. 

"Your majesty," says the station master. "It's time?" 

The King smiles, and it's like the sun coming up over the rocky snow-dusted ridges of his face. The station master knows it's time, and the King knows he knows, but there's a comfortable familiarity in the exchange, as familiar as the cold morning and the carpet of snow and the lantern the station master takes down from its hook beside his door. His clock runs on arrivals and departures, and the King's timetable is fixed. The King and the world's best knight come home once each year, at the darkest hour; but that's all the time they're allotted, while the world needs them out on the tracks. 

"Come along, Lord Terminus," says the King, and down in the snow, Lancelot laughs. He and the Queen meet them as they come down the steps, and they walk away from the house and the horses, out towards the through track where the saddle-tanker waits for them, loaded with freight—wood and iron, machinery and magic. The station master leads the way, his lantern held high. 

They stop just short of the caboose, where the conductor leans on the railing of the back platform clutching a tin thermos of coffee, his hat pulled down over his eyes. 

It's started to snow again, in perfect delicate flakes. The station master turns politely away, to give the King and the Queen and Lancelot a measure of privacy in which to say their farewells. He studies the old clunker of a train, the weathered wood of the sleepers, the cathedral arches of his station, but he turns back an instant too soon—just in time to see Guinevere lean up to kiss Lancelot, and then her husband, and then pull them both close, as if she could keep them there forever. The station master looks away again, wishing it was in his power to grant them more time. But after a moment Guinevere heaves a rusty sigh. 

"Come back to me," she says fiercely. 

"Always," says Arthur. 

Lancelot catches her hand and presses a kiss to her gloved fingers. "My Queen." 

"Take care of each other," she says, reaching for Arthur with her free hand. 

The two men nod, and then, with a last lingering brush of hands, they turn and throw their packs over the railing and climb up after them, swinging onto the platform of the train. 

The conductor passes his thermos of coffee to the King, claps the world’s best knight on the shoulder, and blows his whistle. A moment later, the train begins to move. 

The station master and the Queen stay where they are for a long time, watching the train roll down the track—it's a long, straight track in the snow, in the dark, and after a while all they can see is a tiny pinprick of light, where a lantern hangs from the caboose. Then even that is gone. The Queen tucks her gloved hands into the pockets of her padded jacket. There's snow collecting on the brim of her hat and the leather cuffs of her riding boots. 

"Come up to the castle," she says abruptly, eyes still fixed on the horizon. "For Twelfth Night." 

The station master blinks, surprised. "My lady?" It's not unheard of, but it's still a break in their accustomed rounds. 

"There are empty seats at the table," she says. "Seats where everyone is equal, and welcome, and we might still make a difference." She smiles, wry and warm in the cold. "Besides, Merlin could use a chess partner who's actually a challenge." 

The station master laughs and turns away from the tracks. The wind's picked up, making his lantern flicker and the snowflakes swirl, and on the wind they can both hear the ghostly call of a distant train. He can see it now: the fire in the castle's massive hearth, the wide Round Table, surrounded by a dozen knights. He can smell the goose cooking and the hot wine, hear the pipes and drums and the righting of wrongs. It's a comfort, on a winter night, to know that Camelot is still there. That despite the storm or the season or the turn of the year, Camelot goes on. 

"It would be my honor," the station master says to the Queen, and they walk back together through the snow.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Mike, for the poem. I hope this story at least comes close to doing it justice.


End file.
